


Hindsight

by MeridianGrimm



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: (sort of), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Five is 14 years old here in body and consciousness, Gen, Light angst because Five is living in the aftermath of the apocalypse, Pre-Canon, Some Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-17
Updated: 2019-03-17
Packaged: 2019-11-21 18:11:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18145667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MeridianGrimm/pseuds/MeridianGrimm
Summary: Delores wants a story, Five recounts a happy memory, and between the two of them, they have a realization about Vanya.





	Hindsight

_Tell me a story about your family_ , Delores asks.

Five looks up from where he’s laying out the sleeping bag he’d fished out of the ruins of a sports store.  “What’s there to tell?”

 _Your siblings, your mother, what are they like?_ Delores has probably heard enough about Reginald Hargreeves from Five over the past year, all of it biting criticisms and cursing the old man to hell and back.  It’s easier not to think about the family that he’d buried during his first week post-apocalypse.

“You mean ‘what _were_ they like’,” he correctly bitterly, but – “I know, I know, that wasn’t the point.”  Delores waits.  “I don’t know, Delores, they were just – family.  We grew up at the Academy and were trained to fight crime and generally had a shitty time of it under our dear old dad.  I read piles of books, you know, before…” Well, _before_.  “I know our family wasn’t like other families, but it was what I knew.  It was familiar, even though we were his tools and we never knew, beyond the old man’s vague assurances that we were studying to take down villains or some shit, what we were fighting for.”

_There must have been something good about it.  What did you like about your brothers and sisters?_

“Nothing,” Five lies immediately.  He sits down on the sleeping bag and takes in Delores’ unimpressed look.  “Oh fine, I suppose they weren’t the worst thing ever all the time,” he admits grudgingly.  “Just the overwhelming majority of it.”

 _Something good_ , she reminds him, though she sounds like she’s smiling, not scolding him.

He doesn’t want to ruin her good mood.  Five opens his mouth to say he needs to think about it, but instead the words “we had a competitive cookie day” tumble out of his mouth, unbidden.

_Oh?_

“Yeah.  I’d – well, I’d almost forgotten about it.  Vanya didn’t mention it in her memoir.”  It doesn’t make a half-bad story, actually, so he continues the thought: “Dad was away that weekend on business, and Luther and Diego were fighting about something stupid, and they both turned to Allison to demand that she judge a competition between them.  She agreed, but only on the condition that she got to pick the contest.  Once they’d both promised, she told them that whoever baked the better cookie would be the champion.  I think she was in between whatever diets the old man had her on.”

He pauses while Delores chuckles.  “Yeah, she had a hell of a sweet tooth, I know.  Ben wanted to get in on it because one of his favorite characters was a chemist and baking is apparently similar enough.  After Diego and Luther opened up the challenge, though, Klaus joined specifically so he could sit on the counter and eat the ingredients while backseat-driving everyone else’s projects.”  Five shakes his head and laughs.  “He kept adding food coloring to their batter.  Then, Vanya finished up violin practice and wanted to enter too, so Allison gave her the rules.  Vanya dragged a recipe book over to Mom and asked her which ones Allison liked the most, which Diego immediately declared was unfair.”

_Was she trying to make your sister happy?  Or playing to win?_

“The first one,” Five responds, surprised by her question.  “Vanya didn’t really compete with us, since she was different.  She never had any powers to train, you know?  The rest of us all had something, but even though she was born like us she was – ordinary.”  Five’s mouth snaps shut and he frowns.  Saying it out loud like that, it doesn’t sound right.  It’s a habit, dismissing Vanya as a normal girl, but she’d been born spontaneously too in an event that was anything but normal.  Dad was the one who’d run the tests and declared that she must have been a fluke.  Which is an awful thing to say, although until this moment Five hadn’t questioned its truth.

The old man had been a bastard about plenty of things.

“Delores, do you think my sister had powers?”

_What do you think?_

“I don’t know.  I don’t think so.  In thirteen years, she would have noticed, or one of us would have.  God knows our father wanted a complete set of powered kids and Mom monitored our conditions pretty closely.  I know she didn’t have any when she wrote her book, and that’s an even longer time to go without picking up on it.”  But now he’s thinking about how invisible some of their powers can be.  If Klaus had never acknowledged the ghosts out loud, would he have known that no one else could see them?  If Allison had been raised in a house with sign language, would she ever have known the power of her voice?  And if Diego had grown up in a family where tossing sharp objects around was discouraged, would he have thought to try knife-throwing on his own?

“It would make more sense for her to have powers than not, wouldn’t it?” Five asks, mind racing.  “Maybe she never found the trigger for it, maybe it was something obscure.  We only have a small sample size of the forty-three kids, after all – though I’ll bet you anything the old man was monitoring the rest of them discreetly.  Her power could’ve been anything.”  It sounds so right, so obvious.  “I can’t believe – Delores, how did we miss that?  My whole family, for years.  Of course she has powers like us.  What the fuck.”

Their whole childhood suddenly takes on a different light.  Vanya was barred from the team for being ordinary, a choice that shaped her worldview, shaped the way the rest of their siblings treated her, and it was the _wrong choice_.  Dad may have been the first one to separate her, but it was Five and the others who’d unthinkingly accepted the decision.  Here at the end of the world, Five has first-hand knowledge of what isolation can do to a person, and he wouldn’t wish it on his worst enemy.  He’s only been living in the apocalypse for fourteen months, and Vanya was alone for years.

The realization paints her memoir in yet another layer of tragedy, because Vanya’s struggle was apparently a nasty joke from the universe.  Vanya spent her whole book (her whole life) wrestling with being ordinary, but she was probably just as extraordinary as the rest of the Umbrella Academy.  Maybe she still wouldn’t have fought alongside them (although Klaus did, and his power had no practical applications for combat), but she would have been included.

Five doesn’t like the guilt tightening his chest and he quickly pushes it down.  “I’m going to tell her when I get back, Delores.”  And rub it in the old man’s face that he was wrong.

_One step at a time, Five._

“You’re right," he says. “Jumping back through time is first on my list.  Stopping the apocalypse is next.  Then I’ll find Vanya and – you know.  Say something.”  Maybe he’ll apologize, as much as he hates it.  Vanya was the least annoying of his siblings anyway.  Five can maybe manage to do one nice thing for her at the very least.

**Author's Note:**

> Five didn't want to participate in the cookie competition but he certainly ate the results.
> 
> Title is from the saying "hindsight is 20/20" because it's only once Five is in the future that he realizes how wrong Reggie was about how to behave towards Vanya. Right now, Five finds Vanya's situation tragic mostly because she was extraordinary the whole time, but the truth is that whether or not she had powers, Vanya still shouldn't have been treated badly. Five hasn't come to that realization yet.
> 
> Hit me up on my [tumblr](http://meridiangrimm.tumblr.com/) if you want to talk about The Umbrella Academy.


End file.
